It’s amazing how productive an afternoon watching a gig can be.

Following Joe Clark’s excellent presentation at @media and his equally excellent article at A List Apart, I thought it’s about time I did something to address the accessibility options on this site.

So, if you click on ‘Accessibility options’ on the top left you’ll go to a page where you can set a cookie for the new layout.

Just to summarise Joe’s points from his presentation in creating a ‘zoom’ layout (please correct me if this is wrong):

  • Make multicolumn into one column
  • Make small fonts into larger fonts
  • Reorder navigation and content
  • Minimise navigation at the top of the page

I will of course be addressing the point Joe raised in his presentation that low-vision people generally prefer a high contrast (light text on a dark background), which is the version I’ve added here, but people with certain learning difficulties prefer dark type on a pale background. I will be adding a version of this soon.

Doug Bowman of Stopdesign recently added these two different styles to his site. The zoom layout is available for use and was used as the basis for my high contrast stylesheet.

Also, thanks to Roger Johansson for prompting me to get this done and also providing the code for the cookie.

Like I said, this is very much a ‘beta’ layout at the moment. There are problems with it and there are problems with the content ordering and stuff, but it’s a start and hopefully I’ll begin trimming it down over the next few weeks.